Nelly Furtado

Her Portuguese parents, António José Furtado and Maria Manuela Furtado, were born on São Miguel Island in the Azores and had immigrated to Canada in the late 1960s.

Nelly was named after Soviet gymnast Nellie Kim.

Her elder siblings are Michael Anthony and Lisa Anne.

They were raised Roman Catholic.

At age four, she began performing and singing in Portuguese.

Furtado's first public performance was when she sang a duet with her mother at a church on Portugal Day.

She began playing musical instruments at the age of nine, learning the trombone, ukulele and, in later years, the guitar and keyboards.

At the age of 12, she began writing songs, and as a teenager, she performed in a Portuguese marching band.

Furtado has acknowledged her family as the source of her strong work ethic; she spent eight summers working as a chambermaid with her mother, along with her brother and sister, who was a housekeeper in Victoria.

Nelly Kim Furtado (born December 2, 1978) is a Canadian singer and songwriter.

She has sold over 45 million records, including 35 million in album sales worldwide, making her one of the most successful Canadian artists.

Critics have noted Furtado's musical versatility and experimentation with genres.

Furtado was born on December 2, 1978, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

After graduating from Mount Douglas Secondary School in 1996, she moved to Toronto to reside with her sister.

There, she got a full-time job at an alarm company.

Later, she would meet Tallis Newkirk, member of the hip hop group Plains of Fascination.

She contributed vocals to their 1996 album, Join the Ranks, on the track "Waitin' 4 the Streets".

The following year, she formed Nelstar, a trip hop duo with Newkirk.

Ultimately, Furtado felt the trip hop style of the duo was "too segregated", and believed it did not represent her personality or allow her to showcase her vocal ability.

She left the group and planned to move back home.

In 1997, she performed at the Honey Jam talent show.

Her performance attracted the attention of The Philosopher Kings singer Gerald Eaton, who then approached her to write with him.

He and fellow Kings member Brian West helped Furtado produce a demo.

She left Toronto, but returned again to record more material with Eaton and West.

The material recorded during these sessions was shopped to record companies by her attorney Chris Taylor and led to her 1999 record deal with DreamWorks Records, signed by A&R executive Beth Halper, partner of Garbage drummer and record producer Butch Vig.

Furtado's first single, "Party's Just Begun (Again)", was released that year on the soundtrack album for Brokedown Palace (1999).

Furtado first gained fame with her trip hop-inspired debut album, Whoa, Nelly! (2000), which was a critical and commercial success that spawned two top-10 singles on the Billboard Hot 100, "I'm Like a Bird" and "Turn Off the Light".

The former won her a Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

Furtado continued the collaboration with Eaton and West, who co-produced her debut album, Whoa, Nelly!, which was released in October 2000.

Furtado's introspective folk-heavy 2003 second album, Folklore, explored her Portuguese roots.

Its singles received moderate success in Europe, but the album's underperformance compared to her debut was regarded as a sophomore slump.

Furtado's third album, Loose (2006), was a smash hit and became her bestselling album, with more than 10 million copies sold worldwide, also making it one of the bestselling albums of the 2000s.

Considered a radical image reinvention, the album spawned four successful number-one singles worldwide: "Promiscuous" (featuring Timbaland), "Maneater", "Say It Right", and "All Good Things (Come to an End)".

Her 2007 feature on Timbaland's "Give It to Me" in the same era also topped the charts in the US and overseas.

Furtado's critically acclaimed duet with James Morrison, "Broken Strings", also topped the charts in Europe in 2008.

She released her first Spanish-language album, Mi Plan, in 2009, which won her a Latin Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Album.

In 2012, Furtado released her nostalgia-inspired fifth album The Spirit Indestructible.

Furtado has a star on Canada's Walk of Fame, and was awarded Commander of the Order of Prince Henry on February 28, 2014, by Aníbal Cavaco Silva, the then-President of Portugal.

Furtado split with her management and went independent thereafter, releasing her indie-pop sixth album, The Ride, in 2017 under her own label Nelstar Entertainment.

She has won many awards throughout her career, including one Grammy Award from seven nominations, one Latin Grammy Award, ten Juno Awards, one BRIT Award, one Billboard Music Award, one MTV Europe Music Award, one World Music Award, and three Much Music Video Awards.